Obama Promises Massive New Spending
The president-elect will create or save 2.5 million jobs with a “bold” economic plan. Details? So far we only have sweeping generalities: nationalized health care, spending on infrastructure, corporate welfare aimed at creating green jobs, etc. I still don’t see anything aimed at creating real growth. It’s going to be a rough 4 years economically.
Archived in: Economy, President-elect Barack ObamaNovember 22, 2008 at 4:39 pm | Trackback
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The bit on “infrastructure”: Do I sense a return to the CCC? And the ” Green Jobs” bit: “Green” technology costs more, and needs R&D. Until there is useful technology, the jobs won’t be there. And R&D usually takes time.
The most ludicrous of all political fictions is that government can “create jobs”. Government is a consumer, not a producer. It can create a wage-earner by hiring and making a payroll composed of income taken from the private sector…which is where jobs are “created” by productive work. Total new government employment is a transfer payment.
It’s true that some infrastructure projects can add to total, national, capital wealth…even Marx admittedit with a labor theory of value, but the projects have life cycles that begin and end….road improvement, bridges, dams, that kind of thing. But claiming an addition to total employment through government hiring is a lie, swallowed by credulous and/or desperate fools.
This is from a comment at Roger Simon’s:
“In 1939, after seven years of The New Deal, the unemployment rate still stood at 20%. Henry Morgenthau, Secretary of the Treasury and personal confidant of Roosevelt, testified before the House Ways and Means Committee to explain why unemployment was still so high. Here is what he said:
“We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. And I have just one interest…and if I am wrong someone else can have my job. I want to see this country prosperous. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises. I say after eight years of this administration, we have just much unemployment as when we started…And an enormous debt to boot”.”
And now we have numbskulls like Donk Rep Tim Ryan, claiming that Card Check will “level the playing field” in the auto industry by hobbling successful companies like Toyota and Honda with the same stinking policies that ruined GM, Chrysler and Ford.
When in God’s name are Americans going to realize that elected government in this era attracts the worst of the batch, the mediocre, the stupid, the avaricious, the dishonest and the corruptible. Find any legislature and separate the solids from the slime, and you won’t have too many solids.
Goodbye America. The morons are not only in charge, they’re abroad in the land.
It is like tidying up a drunk. Only after they hit bottom and roll around in the muck, is it possible to get them to clean up.
These are the American fools, believing lunch is free. The bottom is close, but not here yet. And they haven’t rolled around blaming the enablers for the pain yet. More foreclosures and bankruptcies, more job losses, more watching broadcast TV, not cable, drinking out of jelly jars not fancy glasses, chipped plates, and real beater cars. They’ll be doing jobs that illegals won’t do and be glad to have them.
You think Gramps was BSing about how it was? Do you think your parents were cheap alte knacker products of the early ’50’s?
Do’t worry, your retirement programs can’t go below $0.
After all this and only after all this, will the survivors get up; just in time to bury the losers. This is what happened the last time the government fixed everything.
I think that one infrastructure project that President Obama should consider is the Trans-Global Highway, proposed by Frank X. Didik a number of years ago. Didik, if you recall, was the founder of the Electric Car Society, in the early 1980’s and has been a strong advocate of electric cars for years. According to Didik, the proposed “highway”, which would contain roads, rail roads, water, oil and gas pipes as well electric and communication cables. The highway would use and standardize the existing road networks and build new roads as well as a number of key tunnels. Interestingly, the longest Tunnel in the proposal, would still be shorter than the longest existing tunnel today. It would seem that there are many advantages to the construction of the Trans Global Highway including vastly lower cost and faster shipping, better allocation of resources, the ability of utilizing raw materials and much lower carbon emissions, than the existing transportation system. The highway would open up a new era of international cooperation. The Trans-Global Highway site is located at www.TransGlobalHighway.com